Industrialized Construction Firms and Digitally-Enabled Product Platforms: An International Case Study

Construction firms are taking up both digital delivery and product platforms for industrialized construction to benefit from economies of scale and scope. The digitally-enabled product platforms becomes important, which such platform is defined as a collection of common and stable modules and interfaces that can derive products effectively using digital delivery. Existing construction management literatures have focused on the usage of product platforms; however, there is relatively less on platforming, which encompasses both the development and implementation of digitally-enabled product platform. This paper takes a comparative case study approach from nine international case firms to examine how construction firms strategize for platforming. Findings show that three typologies of platforms that firms developed a kit of parts only, and also developed structured interface, and also developed design rules. This paper articulates the influencing role of customer requirement certainties across multiple market segments in shaping these strategies. The contribution is to extend work on construction product platform strategies, by providing a novel classification of platforming strategies with a focus on digitally-enabled product platforms, under varied certainties of customer requirements across market segments. This has implications for practitioners and opens new areas for research, taking the characteristics of customer requirements within or across markets into account in strategic decision-making on digitally-enabled product platforms.